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Blogs by David W. Page
Medical school reform - is now the time to make health care safer? 5/11/2017 4:41:32 AM
With the devastating and growing medical information overload, we need to accept that smart machines for instant medical data retrieval are vital to patient safety. New areas in need of true mastery (not just given lip-service) such as teamwork and leadership skills, not to mention communication ability, should be taught from the first day in school. Isn't it time to change the impersonal 'doctor-sitting-in-front-of-a-computer-in-the-examining-room' culture? I believe the medical school curriculum should be tossed out and reinvented with patients in mind from the get-go. My new area of interest is to move beyond surgeon capability and look at the competence of all doctors. It starts in medical school. The young medical students who will graduate in the next three or four years will be faced with the following problem: medical information will double every 73 days. No one can master it all. We couldn't before smart digital devices. Now, doctors can't fake knowing everything, but medical educators are resisting the obvious need to use our 'second brains', our digital devices as a matter of a sound educational process, but more importantly as a safe way to retrieve information in any health care setting. Relying on memory is a big cause of medical errors.
One problem relates to the old 'open' book' type of exam. Why shouldn't medical students use their cell phones to take multiple choice question exams? What are we testing? Recognition of facts? What we need are compassionate doctors who actually know how to reason. Lots has been written about these and other medical education dilemmas, but precious little has changed over the last three or four decades. Big problem is that basic science professor types who are swarming in research have traditionally taught first and second 'pre-clinical' year courses emphasizing molecular and cellular biology that no one uses in practice. We need to dump all of that minutae, the useless facts of science, and start teaching tomorrow's doctors how to actually examine patients and how to talk to them face-to-face, not face-to-computer. Of course it would mean a huge paradigm shift, including ripping capitalism out of health care.
